


Four or Five Moments

by Kanthia



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-28 23:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15717273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kanthia/pseuds/Kanthia
Summary: Being a hero isn't a full-time job -- rather, it's in the tough choices we make when everything is on the line.(Goku-centric, introspective, oneshot)





	Four or Five Moments

**Author's Note:**

> “Four or five moments,” Colossus says. “Four or five moments -- that’s all it takes to be a hero. Everyone thinks it’s a full-time job. Wake up a hero. Brush your teeth a hero. Go to work a hero. Not true. Over a lifetime there are only four or five moments that really matter. Moments when you’re offered a choice --" ( _Deadpool_ , 2016)

**01\. spare an enemy**

When Gohan was young Chi-Chi had been emphatic about putting an end to all this fighting and training nonsense. Piccolo was gone, wasn’t he? The great adventures of their childhood were over, Fire Mountain now a handsome little city where people could walk down a paved road to buy milk from grocery stores instead of having it delivered by the Turtle Hermit’s pupils. Goku had been hesitant -- a life without combat seemed sour to him, in a way he couldn’t place or describe -- but he loved his wife more than anything, and maybe he could find purpose in peace and quiet and the secret things hidden in dark places in the woods and the tiny little baby she’d placed delicately in his arms, saying _careful his head, there you go -- that’s your daddy, Gohan_.

Then there was the reunion on Kame Island and everything had gone straight to hell.

One year and one day later and here they are, broken and ruined on a battlefield miles and miles away from where they started, most of them dead. His childhood fights were nothing like this, nowhere near as brutal -- and yet something in his blood is surging. He’s _needed_ this! A year of running and training and running, and always driven by the thought of the coming fight, the need to get strong enough to defeat, to hurt, to kill something --

 _Oh,_ Goku thinks, lying on the ground, too drained to move anything but a single thought: _that’s what Raditz meant when he called me a Saiyan._

Someone’s yelling. Krillin has Yajirobe’s sword pointed at at Vegeta’s prone body. It would be so easy and clean to just end it like that, but the easy thing and the right thing are very rarely the same thing; Gohan’s watching, and he needs to set an example before his son gets too strong. Maybe this is for Piccolo, whom he had once shown mercy to, and who had returned the favour five years later by saving his son. Maybe there’s hope for everyone, even this half-dead guy who calls himself a prince.

Maybe killing someone is nothing more than a waste of life.

And maybe -- maybe he’s trying to justify a very selfish and dangerous thing. There are parts of him that love that more than anything. Is it okay to live selfishly, for the pursuit of adventure? He’s still the same boy who destroyed the entire Red Ribbon Army, after all, just a little older.

There’s no time to think. He makes a choice.

 _No_ , he whispers. Then louder, forcing what a little air a pair of collapsed lungs can manage into a command: _No, Krillin._

 

* * *

**  
02\. conquer a flaw**

Something has happened that Goku honestly doesn’t quite understand, some monumental shift in him. He can’t tell if it was the tank on Frieza’s ship, or the bath he took in starlight on the way to Namek, or the response from his bones to one hundred times Earth’s gravity, or something else -- but something about him has changed. He’s never pretended to have a firm grasp on his own physiology, where the kid raised on Mount Paozu ended and the kid born on some long-gone planet in space began, but in death Vegeta had gasped out something about Super Saiyans, and now here they are:

Frieza, heavy as death, rising from the ocean, pointing towards Piccolo; Gohan, frozen in fear; Krillin, begging for help; the smell of burnt rubber and cooked meat -- it had all been too much. In that moment Goku had turned into himself and at his very centre arrived at a sort of sticking point, the crossroads between his heart and his lungs, the realization that all the strength in the universe is meaningless if you can’t protect the ones you love. In response to the pain of loss something darker than fear had bloomed in him, the despair that breeds an inconsolable rage, the need to protect that overwhelmed the desire to outmatch, an agony that rattled his ribcage and burst out of his stomach with static electricity and a sound like somebody screaming.

He is the moon to Frieza’s sun; he has become an eclipse.

It’s a power that begs to be set free, demands the body submit to its potential. Restraining it is physically painful. Goku would love nothing more than to surrender to the call of his ancestors and rip Frieza’s throat out of his neck, tear off his limbs, flay his guts and suck the marrow from his bones, really make him suffer for what he’s done --

\-- but he can’t. What kind of person, father, Earthling would he be if his power was used for something like that?

If he must hold back, so be it.

(Frieza stares up at him, cleaved fully in half. Neither he nor Namek will not last long. Goku will mourn them both, wonderous things that were destroyed for no reason.)

Mercy is not instinctual to him, but if he must deny himself the satisfaction of surrendering to whatever a Super Saiyan really is, if he must force himself to be merciful to prove to himself and his son and Vegeta that they are more than killers, that the purpose of power is to protect and not to destroy -- then he will not kill Frieza.

 

* * *

 

**03\. make a sacrifice**

There was a night in the hospital after the fight with Vegeta when he was still wrapped up and immobile, nursing his wounds and thinking about a trip to Namek, when Gohan had climbed into his bed and snuggled in next to him and whispered that he’d learned to sense energy while training with Piccolo.

Goku remembers little from when he himself was five years old -- those memories of Grandpa Gohan are all intermingled, the taste of fresh meat and the smell of wood smoke -- but as he and his son swapped stories of their year, whispering to let Krillin sleep, a thought had begun turning over in Goku’s head.

Gohan isn’t like him. That much had been made clear to him that night, in the calm and patient ways he described the woods where Piccolo had trained him, the round saucers of his eyes reflecting moonlight while Goku recounted the sight of King Kai’s planet at the end of Snake Way. There’s a depth to him that is more than Saiyan or human, a quality of emotion that is astounding for his age, and Goku files the pride in his son next to the pride in himself, a thing to be counted on in tough times.

Then there had been the fight on Namek, and the turning-point Vegeta called a Super Saiyan. Goku had seen what power was borne from emotion, and he’d resolved to one day see it in his own son.

So he’d taken him into the Room of Spirit and Time. Cell had been incomplete, then; Goku could only guess at his perfect power, and figured that either Trunks would kill him imperfect, or Gohan would be their last hope. He was humble enough to recognize that at some point the fight had ceased to be his.

\-- And Gohan had said, _you’re way too gentle with me. You’re holding back. You can’t go easy on me just because I’m your son --_

\-- And they’d ripped it out of him, damn it! He’d fired on his own son with the intent to kill, poured all his love and fear into the hope that his son had it in him, and he’d _seen_ it, the moment that despair had turned to resolution in his son’s own eyes, and he grew a little older.

And then took all that faith and placed it before Cell. Cell, who had said, in a voice that was a bit of Goku and a bit of Vegeta and a bit of Piccolo and a bit of Frieza but not human, not humble and hopeful and resilient like a human, _that’s it, let it all go_ , and Gohan had opened himself up to the reality of his half-human blood like a blossom in the spring.

He’d known. Perhaps he’d known from the moment his son had burst from Raditz’ pod, or from the day Chi-Chi had first placed him, gently, in Goku’s arms: he’d known that some day there would be a fight that only Gohan could win.

Grandpa Gohan had died when Goku was twelve years old. By his reckoning, Gohan is twelve now, too. It’s too young to lose a father. It’s too young for any of this, but here they are, and Cell is about to blow. There’s not much time; Goku’s mind his fixed on the realization of what must be done. Out there, unaware of what Goku is about to do to him, King Kai’s life radiates out into the universe gentle and warm.

_Hey. You put up a good fight, Gohan. I’m proud of you._

Gohan kneeling at his feet.

_\-- Daddy?_

He’ll die with nothing in his heart but love and pride.

_Goodbye, my son._

 

* * *

  

**04\. save a friend**

Vegeta has always been emotional. It’s the source of his power, whether or not he cares to admit it: the way he submits himself to his lust and his rage, yes, but also his self-respect and his honour, allows himself to drown in the imminence and the intensity of the moment. Goku can’t relate, isn’t even sure if he can admire -- but he can certainly appreciate, and perhaps even understand.

Seven years of fatherhood have been hard on him. Goku remembers the sour taste of peace in his throat and how he’d swallowed it for the sake of his son and his wife, but Vegeta’s not like him. There’s too much of their homeworld in his heart, too much dissonance between how he was raised and where he is now.

\-- So he’d surrendered himself to Babadi, and then immediately betrayed him to focus on Goku; called it pride when it was pride but also loneliness and fear and the storm of emotions that comes from dismantling one’s supposed innate nature and using the base parts to rebuild it into something else.

It’s been years since Goku’s had a challenge this magnificent, his good versus a boundless evil with the fate of the universe on the line.

And so, when the white-hot of the egg gives way to the terrifying emptiness that is Majin Buu, and Goku knows that the time has come to put a squabble of ten years to rest, he swallows around burning lungs and tries something very brave, and very stupid.

He stares down this fool of a prince and tells him that they need to stop, that _everyone on Earth will be killed, you hear me? -- Bulma, Trunks --_

Something shifts in Vegeta. He never could hide his true feelings -- always wore his heart in his eyes.

_\-- They’re nothing to me._

_\-- Talk all you want, Vegeta, but you’d better convince yourself of it first._

He can’t deny it; if someone as simple as Goku can see it, no doubt he knows it in himself: he’s changed, like Yamcha and Tienshinhan changed, like Android 18 changed, like Piccolo changed. You give someone a chance, be vulnerable before them at the moment of their defeat, and they just might surprise you.

(Then Vegeta knocks him out, steals the last senzu and goes off to atone for his past by taking out Buu. Goku hadn’t put much stock in how sore Vegeta must have been over the way he'd gone down with Cell. Well -- their first deaths had been humiliating, speared through the chest, bleeding out at the feet of sworn enemies; here they are now with wives and children and a new sort of purpose and something worth sacrificing one's life for.

It’s not an easy choice. But it's a good one.)

 

* * *

 

**  
05\. and in these moments everything else falls away**

Vegeta raises a hand and points his wrath towards the prone form of Majin Buu -- or, at least, what’s left of him, this sad pastiche of innocence and chaos that presents itself as evil, the last remains of the long-dead Grand Supreme Kai.

“No, Vegeta,” Goku says, and finally we have come full circle.

**Author's Note:**

> (this is obviously what they had in mind when they wrote that line, right? right??)
> 
> (find me, as always, on [tumblr](http://kanthia.tumblr.com/))


End file.
